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Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Frenzy

The “Jussie Smollett hate crime” story is much in the “news” just now, owing to its original, lurid character, and to the discovery, after patient investigation, that it was a fraud from first to last. Commentators innumerable have discoursed on its “significance” both before and after its debunking. The shitstorm appears to have peaked, though the impassioned rhetoric continues.

Almost at once, major figures on the Left loosed public statements and fusillades of “tweets” condemning – who else? – conservative Americans generally for our “racism.” Commentators on the Right demanded substantiation, for which the aforementioned Leftists condemned them. As Smollett’s allegations unraveled under scrutiny, the shrieking from the Left crescendoed as the Right figuratively crossed its arms, sat back, and smirked at yet another case of racialist fakery “disposed of.”

If it’s been disposed of, then why is it still the hottest button in American commentary? Why has this self-serving racialist con job, written, produced, and directed by its “victim” for entirely self-serving purposes, continued to command so much media attention?

In large part it’s because the media, especially the giants of social media, have decreed that only opinions from the Left shall be aired in their networks. Merely to report, as Rod Dreher and others have done, that the Chicago police have debunked Smollett’s allegations is deemed unspeakable on Facebook.

Yes, it’s about the Left’s desire to defend its “narrative,” but that should elicit further questions: What narrative? What reason has any private person in this country, aware of the realities of contemporary social tensions, to believe such an obvious con job? Isn’t the fakery just more evidence that the Left’s shrieking about the Right’s awfulness is a lot of crap?

Surely we’ve had enough of this. Yet it keeps coming. The media partake in the fakery by giving the Left’s claims of Right-wing bigotry and violence wildly disproportionate attention. As the facts emerge, the media, including social media, collaborate with the Left’s efforts to suppress mention of them. When that’s no longer possible, the media disallow further discussion of the affair: it’s “yesterday’s news.”

The pattern has had several high points. Tawana Brawley. The Duke Lacrosse case. Covington Catholic / Nathan Phillips. Matthew Shepard. And now this exceedingly minor figure in the world of entertainment – both black and homosexual, a twofer! — who was upset that he’d been “excessed.” Unless you’re a left-wing true-believer who discards any facts that contradict the Left’s dicta, you simply can’t be fooled any longer. So why does it continue?

My thesis is that the Left has nothing else. No other weapons remain to it.

The word of the day is frenzy.

frenzy,n:

extreme mental agitation; wild excitement or derangement.

a fit or spell of violent mental excitement; a paroxysm characteristic of or resulting from a mania.

Paroxysm is the applicable descriptor for what the Left has been doing. As the effect of its “bigoted oppressors” tactic has attenuated near to zero, it’s multiplied and intensified its efforts. Its mania is born of the recognition that it has lost the intellectual, social, and moral battles for the respect and allegiance of the American electorate. The only weapon it retains is the ability to stir a furor out of accusations of bigotry, with the assistance of its media handmaidens. Owing to its repeated failures, married to Americans’ perceptions of the reality around them, that ability has faded almost entirely away. But that’s its only weapon in the struggle for “mindshare.” Like a duelist with a blunted sword, it must keep flailing away.

The Left can’t change tools because it has no others. Yet it cannot yield, for to the Left, power is the only thing that matters. The mania for power plus the lack of alternative tactics induces the paroxysm of frenzied action.

Decent Americans are tired of it. We want it to cease. As it hasn’t, we’ve begun to turn away from the media organs that press it upon us. We’ve begun to exclude the shrieking true believers from our circles. Ever more of us are putting our attention where it’s always belonged: on our communities, our families, and our personal pursuits.

But the Left’s frenzy won’t cease. Indeed, it will strive to pursue us. It will harass the vendors we patronize. It will infiltrate our churches and civic associations. It will browbeat us through what remains of our public life until we wrest the bludgeon from its hand.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness" is one of the fundamental commandments that are absolutely essential to an Age of Reason, and to creating the culture that reason supports. Note that the irrationalists reverse this commandment, to the extent possible. They base their propaganda on lies, as a matter of principle, because Lying is essential to their ethics and politics. They refer to their lies, or fictions, as alternative narratives, and alternative facts. They reject the concept of truth, and the reality it reveals, as something unknowable and unattainable. For them, the procedural laws of epistemology are entirely dependent on a pragmatic approach to achieving one's goals. The truth is merely a knowledge of "whatever works for them, as long as it works for them." (This position effectively cancels the commandment to have no other system of laws, or lawgivers, before you.) Note also that they have reversed all of the other fundamental, or axiomatic, rules that underlie Western Civilization. "Thou shalt not take or covet what is thy neighbors" becomes: "All private property is theft, therefore all that is thy neighbor's must be confiscated, converted to a commonwealth, owned equally by all, and yet, effectively owned by no-one. "Thou shalt not envy thy neighbor" becomes, envy all of thy neighbors, for every distinction that characterizes them as having striven to attain merit and for their every success and improvement. The philosophy of radical equality requires that all distinctions be abolished as invidious, that all human achievements be discouraged as selfish endeavors, that all of humanity be reduced to a level of mediocrity, or pure equality. The Declaration of Independence was a political document, theoretically it created a new system of government, and the artificial concept of political equality for the (assimilated) Citizens. Note that Political equality is entirely man-make,i.e., does not exist in Nature. It does, however, logically follow from a theory of "Rule of Law" as opposed to the other theory, the traditional "Rule of Men." Political equality established a system of human equality before the code of Common Law. Consider that there is no basis for any other form of equality; e.g., We are not physically, mentally, morally, economically, sexually, etc., equal. Note that the 2d Bill of Rights (the implementation of material needs under a welfare state) destroys the originally Bill of Political Rights. Then think about sexual equality, open marriage, etc. and imagine where we will go from here, if we do not challenge it. christiansweeny@yahoo.com